Category Archive: Social Media Trends

ListenLogic advanced social intelligence solutions are profiled in the most recent Gleansight Benchmark Report on Social Listening. The report compiled by Gleanster Research, reviews “the art and science of social listening” and examines the enabling technologies, analytic capabilities, business processes, organizational resources and corporate cultures they’re putting in place to maximize the value of their investment in this initiative in order to to achieve their objectives and ultimately drive increased shareholder value.

The Gleansight Report points to ListenLogic’s pioneering solutions with comprehensive social media monitoring capabilities and provides an overview of the company’s extensive experience delivering advanced social intelligence to leading corporations. The report also features ListenLogic’s unique “approach of combining social media monitoring tools with human filtering.”

The report also highlights ListenLogic for its focus on the pharmaceutical and healthcare space, pointing to its social intelligence product suite tailored to the industry. As the report also states, ListenLogic has been quite successful in carving out a nice around generating insights from patient-to-patient conversations.

More information on the Gleanster Social Listening Report can be found here.

ListenLogic CMO, Mark Harrington, recently wrote a feature in CMS Wire entitled â€˜Five Reasons Marketers Need to Embrace Social Intelligence.â€™ In the piece he states â€œWith an unprecedented wealth of insight available, itâ€™s never been more critical for marketing teams to understand to the countless individuals broadcasting about their business, products, solutions, service and brands.â€

We sat down with Mark to discuss how Marketing teams are using social intelligence to gain competitive advantages.

LL: Mark, can you talk about some of the applications where Marketers are using social intelligence?

MH: A lot of what we deliver revolve around deep consumer insights, from constructing the customer journey and path to purchase to building consumer persona segments and product feature sentiment. The applications for this intelligence are rich; we have clients using these consumers insight to develop media plans since we can tell them how their target audiences are consuming media â€“ music, movies, television, online, video games, you name it, or the hobbies and interests they have.

We work with corporations to help them identify new target segments or enter new markets. We also provide insight on how to save products that are losing market share and how to effectively launch new products. It is also used to measure the efficacy of promotional campaigns or testing product features or packaging. There is such a wide array of Marketing applications advanced social intelligence is becoming a standard staple for many brands.

LL: What about for competitive intelligence? Are corporations using this to track their competitors?

MH: Oh yeah. Most brands first want deep social intelligence on their products. Second, they want to know everything their competitors, and I mean everything. They’re looking for specific strengths and weaknesses to help strategically guide their plan of attack to win market share. We have clients who no doubt have more insight on their competitors than those competitors have on themselves. This is the ultimate in competitive intelligence and that’s incredibly powerful.

ListenLogic Co-Founder and CEO, Vince Schiavone, recently presented to MBA students at Villanova University. During the session he presented how big data processing of social media now delivers advanced social intelligence to leading corporations. Aside from providing an overview of the technology platform, he also explained how this intelligence gleaned from millions of online sources and social networks is making an enterprise-wide impact on groups from Marketing, Brand, and Product to Risk, Legal and Corporate Communications.

Vince also explained how delivering insight is an intersection of both art and science on a quantitative and qualitative basis. “The actionability of intelligence largely defines its value,” he explained. “Corporations don’t just want to know what is happening with a market, consumer segment or competitor, they need to know how they should act with the intelligence to benefit their organization.”

Vince gave students a live look-in of ListenLogic’s Social Listening Intelligence Center (pictured) and reviewed how the combination technology and team deliver insight on a multidimensional level most corporations have never seen before.

Vince also illustrated the application of this advanced intelligence with a wide array of case studies spanning some of the largest corporations within the food and beverage, media, automotive, entertainment, financial and technology sectors.

According to a new report from global strategy and consulting group Bain & Company, early adopters of social media have been able to capture real economic value from their activities.Â These social business pioneers were among the first to implement social media into their organizations on a large scale investing anywhere from $750,000 to $10,000,000 a year in social programs. Â As a result, they have slowly but surely answered the popular social media question of ROI.

So, what is the ROI?

Bain & Co. report that a key indicator of social media return is customer loyalty. Customers who engage with companies over social media typically spend 20% – 40% more with those companies than other customers. Additionally, Bain & Co. also found that customers who engage with brands via social media demonstrate a deeper emotional commitment to the companies. Social media is quickly becoming a cornerstone for companies to engage with and retain their customers for both advocacy and customer service.

The strategy of early adopters

Contrary to popular belief, social media doesn’t apply to the ‘Field of Dreams’ principle, building it is not enough. You need to consistently provide value to your customers if you expect them to engage and interact with your brand.

Bain & Co. outlines a few key strategies that helped these social businesses take off:

Social media objectives should be matched to existing business objectives

Key Takeaways

There are a few key learnings from this for any business looking to integrate their social activities and become a more organized and efficient social business.

It’s All About the Data – Without comprehensive data that can go across all facets of the organization, costs will always be higher and results will never be consistent.

Customers are Everywhere – Meeting customer appetite for brand response has extended past the reach of an owned Twitter or Facebook account. Customers are discussing your brand on their own walls, forums, and blogs.

Engagement Must be Scalable – Expect volumes of discussion and brand mentions to rise exponentially on social media. With this, the human cost of data sifting to uncover issues will grow without the proper infrastructure.

What should businesses do? Prepare themselves with better technology to capture more data from more sources and triage to the appropriate individuals and units.

A recent Forrester Research report by Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) states that we have moved from the Information Age to the Age of the Customer, where empowered customers are disrupting every industry. Josh states in his report that successful companies must become customer obsessed, mastering deep understanding and engagement with customers. At ListenLogic, we see examples of what Josh says occur every day. A recent CNN article looks at one dimension of the Age of The Customer, clearly illustrating the need for real-time listening and understanding of social customer data.

Social Media has changed business in many ways. Mobile devices, smartphones and iPads are now constant companions to over one billion consumers and they use them constantly to consume a constant stream of professional and social media data. Mobile consumers publish a constant stream of thoughts, opinions, reviews, recommendations, praises and complaints.

There are three key drivers that power the Amplification of Social Media in the Age of the Customer that brands need to understand:

The average American has 634 ties in their social network (Pew http://bit.ly/lJdBPI). If a positive or negative issue resonates, it will travel from network to network and grow quickly and exponentially.

The Press is always listening to social media, they have an insatiable appetite for controversy and publish 24/7. The bigger the brand and more negative the story, the more likely the Press will follow.

Activists and individuals have learned how to “crank up” the Amplification to increase amount and velocity of spread. People have learned that what you post, where you post, and how you post makes a big difference. Carefully crafted messages posted to influential sites and posted to generally easy to monitor sites using company, brand, product, and stock symbol keywords and hashtags will be picked up quickly.

The most important thing for big brands to understand is that customer complaints amplified by social media will affect your brand and every brand with increasing frequency. It is a reality of the Age of the Customer. Some complaints will be false and intentionally malicious, some routine and minor, and a few will be embarrassing and damaging to your reputation and stock price. The response to these complaints can range from ignoring, to correcting, to apologizing. In every case a companies’ ability to quickly identify, understand, and respond appropriately is the key to minimizing the social spread and impact.

We hope you find the commentary and article helpful. Please feel free to contact me ListenLogic with any questions you may have. We would be happy to provide you and your team with an educational update on Best Practices Social for CRM and Social Reputation Management in the Age of the Customer.